Ariel Dorfman’s life has been marked by a love of two languages, each of which In all, Dorfman has published six novels, a memoir, numerous essays, short sto- he has scorned. He returned to Spanish as a suitor with nothing(s) on the tongue. ries, poetry, and several plays, each of which, he has said, tells the story of He has been wedded to English in desperate times. In his memoir of a bilingual in a different way. That has meant that much of his work is about being haunted, life, Heading South, Looking North, Dorfman notes that languages “do not only he has said. “You have to make amends to the dead. There are people who died expand through conquest: they also grow by offering a safe haven to those who so that you could be alive. How do you do that? How do you speak to the dead, come to them in danger.” for the dead, in spite of the dead? But mine is not only a narrative of death; it’s a narrative of life and of celebration, as well.” Dorfman came to English in danger. Three years after he was born Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman in , in 1942, his family was forced to flee following a pro-Fascist military coup. His parents were secular Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and his father, a Communist economist, was critical of the new government. They moved to New York where Dorfman contracted pneu- monia. “I entered the hospital speaking Spanish but when I came out I didn’t speak a word of it,” he has said. After three weeks in an isolation ward where doctors spoke to him only in English, Dorfman didn’t speak Spanish again for ten years.

Dorfman’s family returned to Latin America in 1954. They settled in , Chile. Dorfman relearned Spanish in high school then went to college at the University of Santiago, where he was later a professor. He joined the Popular Unity government of Salvadore Allende, working as a publicist and propagandist for Allende’s political efforts and, in 1971, co-writing a legendary critique of North American imperialism called How to Read Donald Duck. In 1973, the year Dorfman published his first novel, Hard Rain, a military coup led by General left Allende dead. Dorfman survived by seeking asylum in the Argentine Embassy and declaring himself an exile.

Dorfman eventually settled in the and returned to the English language. In his 17 years of exile during Pinochet’s rule by torture and disappear- ance, Dorfman published three novels of isolation, where men mysteriously dis- appear and their widows find their bodies floating in rivers, and exiles try and fail at rebellion. He has taught at since 1985 and, since democracy was restored to Chile in 1990, he has split his time between the two countries. His first work after the end of Pinochet’s reign was Death and the Maiden.

2 3 Death and the Maiden is set somewhere between the universal and specific, in “a commissions was limited in scope: they examined in detail country that is probably Chile but could be any country that has given itself a the disappearance and torture only of those who died democratic government just after a long period of dictatorship.” The prerequi- during the regimes, and they did not name the people site is that the country examine its experience of terror and loss, which means who organized or carried out the torture. (In Argentina, the play has a sadly expansive applicability. Since it was first performed in Chile the names of military personnel were included only in the in 1991, Death and the Maiden has been performed in 30 countries. In Israel, private report to the President, but they were leaked to Belgrade, Belfast, Brazil, Kenya, Dorfman has said, “audiences were able to read newspapers and published.) It is estimated that 30,000 their own experiences into the text.” people were disappeared in Argentina, about 3,000 were disappeared in Chile, and about 300 in Uruguay. The play also has a historical specificity that applies not just to Chile, but to Hundreds of thousands more were tortured and survived. much of Latin America. The 1973 military coup, in which General Augusto A 2004 investigation concluded that 35,000 people had Pinochet established a 17-year military junta in place of Chile’s elected govern- been tortured in Chile under Pinochet. ment, echoed in neighboring countries throughout the decade. Argentina, Uru- guay, and Brazil each saw their elected socialist governments overthrown and Because of amnesty laws established in the 1980s, Chile and replaced by repressive military rule. Argentina have had little success trying those responsible for disappearances. Chilean courts have used loopholes in In each country, the military rulers used a brutal tactic of “disappearing”—qui- the law to convict more than 100 torturers of kidnapping, etly kidnapping, torturing, and killing—left-wing sympathizers. Disappearing rather than murder or disappearances, but the main was built for disorientation; it was a way to erase enemies and paralyze the popu- architect of the regime, General Augusto Pinochet, died lace. “Nunca Mas” (“Never Again”), the 1984 report of the Argentine National in December 2006 before he could be tried. Argentina’s Commission on the Disappeared, was begun in the first weeks after the military Supreme Court struck down its amnesty laws in 2003 dictatorship’s end to investigate the fate of the country’s disappeared. The report and in late 2006, two police officers were convicted of detailed the carefully crafted reasons for the technique and its layers of conceal- disappearances. Theirs were the first convictions in over ment: “First it was the people, their absence giving hope to the relatives that the 20 years. kidnap victim would be freed and return; then the concealment and destruction of documentation, which undoubtedly existed in every case, prolonging the un- certainty about what had happened; and finally, the nameless bodies, without identity, driving people distraught at the impossibility of knowing the specific fate of their loved one. It was a bottomless pit of horror.”

Reports called “Nunca Mas” were also created in Brazil and Uruguay, while Chile’s equivalent was known as the Rettig Report, after the head of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission (the inspiration for the commission Gerardo heads in Death and the Maiden) that released it. Each of the countries’

4 5 QUESTIONS

1. Dorfman has written that he used Paulina’s character to act out the trial of 7. Why is Schubert’s string quartet Death and the Maiden important for Paulina? Chile’s torturers he couldn’t conduct in reality. But even in fiction, he “could What does it represent by the end of the play? not imagine another ending: the tragedy of my country is that we cannot put the murderers and violators on trial.” What is the use of fictionalizing an act of 8. When Roberto and Gerardo discuss the Commission in Act I, Scene 2, Rober- reckoning or revenge that has the same result as reality? to begins by saying, “In this country everything finally comes out into the open,” and ends by saying, “I’m afraid there are things we’ll never know.” Why does he 2. Dorfman was criticized by an Hispanic actor’s group for using Anglo actors change his mind? What information does Roberto learn through the course of (Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss, and ) in the Broadway version this dialogue? What is the tenor of this conversation if he is an interested citizen, of his play. Dorfman has said that the play is a universal one, not limited to Chile. and how does it change if he is a torturer? Does the race or ethnicity of Paulina, Gerardo, and Roberto change the dynamics of the play? How? 9. In the last scene, Roberto enters the concert hall under a ghostly light; the stage directions note, “He could be real or he could be an illusion in Paulina’s 3. “In a country such as Chile, where everything has been deformed and twisted head.” What are the implications if he is real? What are the implications if he is by dictatorship, love is also a victim,” Dorfman has said. “But love is also the last a figment? place of refuge, so I think [Death and the Maiden] is also a love story. It’s a story about how a love survives.” Do you agree with Dorfman that love survives in the play? How is Paulina and Gerardo’s marriage entwined with the country’s fate? What are the private, and public, strains on their relationship?

4. Paulina says that what she really wants is for Roberto to confess about what he did “not just to me,” but “everything to everybody.” Once he writes his confes- sions, she will “keep a copy forever, with all the information, the names and data, all the details.” How is her desire for names and information different than the names and information the Commission can collect?

5. How does Roberto’s introduction as a “Good Samaritan” influence your view of him?

6. The first scene in the last act of Death and the Maiden ends with a giant mir- ror in front of the audience and spotlights trained on certain people in the seats. What is the purpose of these devices? How would you feel if a spotlight fell on you? How would you feel if it fell on the person in front of you?

6 7 Plays: Widows (Pantheon, 1983) The Resistance Trilogy (Nick Hern Books, 1998) Pergatorio (Nick Hern Books, 2006)

Fiction: The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (Viking, 1987) Mascara (Viking, 1988) Hard Rain (Readers International, 1990) My House Is on Fire (Viking, 1990) Blake’s Therapy (Seven Stories Press, 2000) The Burning City (Doubleday, 2003) Konfidenz (Dalkey Archive, 2003) The Nanny and the Iceberg (Seven Stories Press, 2003) BABEL is sponsored by: Essays: The Empire’s Old Clothes (Pantheon, 1983) Some Write to the Future (Duke University Press, 1991) Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998) Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet. (Seven Stories Press, 2002) Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations 1980-2004. (Seven Stories Press, 2004)

Poetry: Last Waltz in Santiago and Other Poems of Exile and Disappearance (Viking, 1988) In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land: New and Collected Poems from Two Languages (Duke University Press, 2002)

Additional Resources: “Ariel Dorfman.” http://www.adorfman.duke.edu/

Postel, Danny. “Ariel Dorfman Interview.” The Progressive. Dec. 1998.

“P.O.V.’s Borders: American ID: Choice.” http://www.pbs.org/pov/borders/2006/ Just Buffalo Literary Center Ticket Information and Purchases: ch_americanshadows.html Market Arcade Phone: 716.832.5400 617 Main St. Suite 202A Fax: 716.270.0184 “An Ariel Dorfman Resource Page.” http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/s/a/sam50/ Buffalo, NY 14203 www.justbuffalo.org/babel dorfman.htm

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